John Wilkes Booth Mummy

On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. His assassin, John Wilkes Booth, fled the theater on a getaway horse and was on the run for twelve days.

This prompted a manhunt with a $100,000 reward, equivalent to over $1,800,000 today. On April 26, Booth and his accomplice, David Herold, were located at a farm in Virginia. Herold surrendered but Booth refused, so the barn they were hiding in was set on fire. In the confusion, Booth was shot and killed by Union soldiers. Years later his body would be buried in an unmarked grave on his family plot.

Not all believe Booth died on that day in 1865. Some think he escaped the barn, despite his body being identified by a number of people, including a doctor who had previously operated on it. He allegedly continued to live his life in Texas as John St. Helen. St. Helen became ill and thinking he was on his deathbed, he confessed to his lawyer, Finis L. Bates, grandfather of actress Kathy Bates, that he was really Booth and had assassinated Lincoln. St. Helen did not end up dying that night, so he relocated to Enid, Oklahoma under the name David E. George.

David E. George committed suicide by strychnine poisoning at the Grand Avenue Hotel on January 13, 1903. Garfield Furniture, which currently occupies the Grand Avenue Hotel building, remains a tourist attraction for those who believe John Wilkes Booth was David E. George.

No one claimed the body of David E. George, so it was embalmed and put on display at Penniman’s funeral home, which also doubled as a furniture store. The displayed mummy became a local attraction. Years later, Bates would identify and claim the body as John St. Helen

The body of George/ St. Helen/ Booth would go on to live another life on the traveling sideshow circuit, partly fueled by Bates’ 1907 book, The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth. Bates would cash in on the legend by renting the body out for display.

One of the mummy’s renters was carnival owner, William Evans. In 1920, while the mummy was in Evans’ care, the circus train it was being carried on crashed and killed eight people and multiple circus animals. But the mummy remained unscathed.  Not long after the train tragedy, the mummy was kidnapped. Evans offered a reward for its return. The kidnapper returned the body to Evans and claimed the reward. 

When Bates died in 1923, his widow sold the Booth mummy to Evans. Evans continued to tour the mummy around America for years.  Eventually, Evans sold the mummy to Joseph Harkin, a former sideshow performer who had worked as a Tattooed Man. Harkin would carry on the tradition of touring the mummy around.

In 1931, doctors examined the mummy to try and give the public a definitive answer as to whether or not the mummy that had traveled the country as John Wilkes Booth, was in fact John Wilkes Booth. Based on a number of specific injuries and a tattoo on Booth’s hand, doctors did believe that it was Booth’s body and in went back on exhibition as the “authentic” body through the 1930s. 

In 1938, Life Magazine ran an article about the mummy and the legend that surrounds it.

The mummy would be bought by Jay Gould’s Million Dollar Circus, where it would tour up until the 1950s. After that, the mummy would disappear from public view and is rumoured to be in the hands of a private collector. 

Decades later, the case of John Wilkes Booth continued to capture the attention of the public. Unsolved Mysteries aired a segment about the John Wilkes Booth mystery in a 1992 episode. There they say that the Smithonian Institute inquired about exhuming the supposed body of Booth and the Booth family agreed. But the state court denied the request. 

Over the years, requests have been made to DNA test the vertebrae of the man the country knows as John Wilkes Booth, killed at Garrett’s farm. A few of his vertebrae were taken after the autopsy and placed in the collection of The Army Medical Museum in 1867. Ironically, the museum opened in the building that was the Ford’s Theatre just two years earlier, the location where Booth killed Lincoln. The museum has since relocated and has been renamed the National Museum of Health and Medicine. The museum still hold that piece of vertebrae in their collection. Proposals have been made to test that DNA against the DNA of Edwin Booth, John Wilkes Booth’s brother. All requests have been denied.

The public may never know if the man killed at Garrett’s farm was John Wilkes Booth. If John St. Helen/ David E. George was an imposter, what was the true identity of the mummy that millions of people viewed for over 40 years?

Written by Eliza Rinn